(Begin excerpts)
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions accused Beijing Thursday of backing a scheme by Chinese and Taiwan companies to steal an estimated $8.75 billion worth of trade secrets from semiconductor giant Micron.

The Justice department unveiled criminal charges against Chinese state-owned Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co., and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) of Taiwan, along with three UMC officials.

It said they conspired to rob US-based Micron's advanced designs to turn Fujian Jinhua into a major player in the global computer chip market.

The charges were the latest in a series of cases targeting what Washington calls an ongoing Beijing program to steal valuable US industrial and commercial secrets in order to advance the Chinese economy.

"Taken together, these cases and many others like them paint a grim picture of a country bent on stealing its way up the ladder of economic development and doing so at American expense," Sessions said....

The indictment released in the US district court in San Jose, California alleges that three former Micron employees in Taiwan -- Stephen Chen Zhengkun, He Jianting and Kenny Wang Yungming -- joined UMC in 2015 and 2016 with the express plan to hand over to the company Micron's design and manufacturing processes for specific dynamic random access memory (DRAM) semiconductors.

Those would then be transferred to Fujian Jinhua under a contract set by Chen...

In recent years Washington has stepped up its fight against China's alleged ongoing economic espionage program against the United States, aiming to obtain all sorts of advanced technologies, from agriculture to heavy manufacturing.

In the past two months the Justice Department has also indicted 12 Chinese, including three intelligence officials, in an alleged five-year plot to steal jet engine technology from major US and French companies who supply the world's airlines.

"China is probably, over the long term, the biggest challenge, national security challenge that faces our country," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday in an interview with Fox News' Laura Ingraham.

"Where the semiconductor piece fits in is, it's part of a mosaic of our strategic effort to push back against this continued Chinese effort." (End excerpts)

3. As expressed in my newly coined terms "Trumpian friendship" and "Trumpian deal", Trump's double-faced strategy in the US-Sino trade war reveals his sinister intents towards China. Nobody can read the mind better than Malaysia’s 93-year-old Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad who slammed the US leader more than once in public -- well, like the fatherly chastisements of a wayward son.

He hit the nail on the head when he called US President Donald Trump “mercurial”, saying: "He changes his mind within 24 hours … When you have a man like that, you need to be cautious." Fortunately for Trump, the outspoken Malaysian politician is ruling a small country. If Mahathir is a leader of a big country like Saudi Arabia, Iran or Canada, Trump will have nightmares of being poked in the eyes every night!

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